Three Tips For Avoiding Founder Burnout

As founders, much of our job is about mitigating the damage from small (and sometimes large) fires that spring up all around us.

For instance, today, someone on the team got a hold of a budget and showed the entire team everyone’s salary and people are pissed. Tomorrow, the shipping system goes down. Yesterday, someone quit unexpectedly. Sometimes being a founder can feel like a giant game of whack-a-mole, except the issues you’re dealing with have real-world consequences.

The consistent cadence of dealing with consequential issue after consequential issue can be absolutely exhausting and, in severe cases, can cause mental health issues or complete burnout for the founder.

What can you do to make it through and not burnout? 

1. Keep Perspective 

I see founder after founder — and to be clear, I used to do this myself — get all-consumed with the current issue of the day. At times, we can almost feed off of the drama. For the health of your business and yourself, you just can’t do this. You have to keep perspective.

There’s a saying that if it’s not going to matter in five years, you shouldn't spend more than five minutes on it, and I would argue that this is a good frame for founders to adopt. Your time, energy, and brain are way too important to your business to be consistently mired in day-to-day drama, so make decisions that are aligned with putting the fire out quickly with as little damage and disruption as possible, and then move onto the more important things for your business. 

2. Acknowledge Your Reality And Adapt 

I once had an investor tell me that being a founder is like false summiting over and over and never actually reaching the top of the mountain. If you’re not familiar with false summiting, it’s a term in mountain climbing when you’re climbing something so steep that you see what you believe to be the summit, but when you reach the “summit” you realize that you actually are still very far away from the top of the mountain.

The investor told me that the job of a founder is not to try to avoid false summiting, but to acknowledge that this is going to be your reality and mentally prepare yourself for it.

The more you practice keeping your patience and cool, even in the face of disappointment, the better you will get at it, but in order to get better at it, you have to acknowledge that this will be your reality for a while. Most days/weeks, you will have to contend with something. It’s up to you to get better at responding. 

3. Take Care of Yourself

The best way to make poor decisions is to try to respond to something when you are completely depleted. Yet, this is what we typically do to ourselves as founders. We tend to:

• overwork ourselves,

• don’t sleep enough,

• don’t eat well,

• and don’t make the time to actually do the things in life that bring us joy.

If you’re operating from this place, you can expect that the issues you’re contending with are going to feel harder to deal with because you’re cup is almost empty, and you’re probably not going to make great decision on how to deal with the issue at hand because your brain isn’t operating as well as it could be.

You owe it to yourself, your team, and your business to be in a good space mentally and physically when you’re making consequential decisions for everyone. 

Nobody said being a founder was going to be easy, but it also doesn’t have to drive you to complete burnout either. With these steps, I hope it might seem a little easier to shoulder the load.